Featured Stories
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In this story by John Edgar Wideman, a young man recovering from a break-up with his girlfriend is inspired by a story about “Doc”, a former academic and college basketballer who lost his eyesight. Doc could still shoot baskets from the foul line, and once held his own in a full game. This causes him to wonder whether, if he had told Doc’s story to his former girlfriend (If a blind man could play basketball surely we . . .), he could have saved their relationship. Themes include relationships, storytelling, race, depression, overcoming challenges, inspiration, hope.
Roald Dahl is best known for short stories that make their point using dark humor and have a surprise ending. This story exhibits neither of these features. The central theme is the racism that existed under British colonial rule. Dahl gets the message across through this allegory about the way a British businessman acted badly towards an Indian doctor who answered his call for help in the middle of the night and may well have saved his life. In the story we learn that there are several kinds of poison. Unlike the deadly krait, some of them kill quite slowly.
This story by Saki satirizes the social obligations imposed upon the middle and upper classes by late-Victorian/Edwardian etiquette. A pompous hypochondriac is holidaying in a peaceful country village as treatment for a nervous condition. He doesn’t like visiting strangers, but does so as a courtesy to his sister who has written letters of introduction to people she knows there. During one such visit, an imaginative fifteen-year-old girl plays an innocent practical joke on the neurotic man, causing him to run from her house in horror. Themes include social conventions, perception (appearance vs. reality), gullibility, escapism, deception.
Set during World War 1, the major theme of his story by Ernest Hemingway is courage: courage to face an enemy in war, and courage to try to rebuild one’s life after being badly injured or suffering a major setback. A wounded American, thought to be Hemingway’s alter ego Nick Adams, visits a Milan hospital every day for exercises to rehabilitate a wounded knee. He shares his fears about returning to the front, and his relationship and experiences with five Italian soldiers undergoing treatment. Other themes: dealing with disability and loss, fear of death, camaraderie, dignity vs. bravado, alienation, loneliness.
The major themes of this story from Jhumpa Lahiri are connection (daughter-parents, grandfather-grandson) and biculturalism (how different generations respond to belonging to two different cultures). A widowed Indian immigrant visits his daughter and three-year-old grandson. The visit triggers memories of the difficulties and frustrations the daughter experienced growing with parents who had different values and beliefs to their adopted culture. It also highlights her lonely, isolated life and strained marriage, and an inner-conflict she feels about the Indian cultural practice of a child taking a widowed parent into their home. Other themes: death and grief, moving on, independence, companionship, loneliness.
In this story by Milan Kundera, a Czechoslovakian college lecturer “rewards” an amateur researcher’s gushing praise by going to great lengths to avoid telling the truth about a substandard paper he has submitted for review. Having spent several years on the paper, the man needs the lecturer’s endorsement to have it published. He refuses to give up, resulting in a comic series of events that culminate in the lecturer not only being charged with immoral conduct by his local communist party committee, but losing his job and the partner he belatedly realizes he loves. Themes include hubris, deception, manipulation, persistence.
In this story by Luisa Valenzuela, a pubescent girl in an isolated seaside community spends a lot of time fantasizing with her sister over the imaginary depraved, murderous activities of a seemingly harmless recluse living nearby. The additional conjugations of “to kill” at the end of the story suggest the girls may have taken matters into their own hands. A major theme is the danger of judging someone based on their looks or eccentric behaviour. Other themes include gender inequality and violence in society, imagination, egocentrism, paranoia, dehumanization (of both the man and their “friend” Pocha), superstition.
This dark comedy from Oscar Wilde involves a gullible young aristocrat who believes a palm-reader’s prediction that he will commit a murder. Out of consideration for his fiancé, he decides that he should postpone their marriage until he can get the deed out of the way. Convinced that he is merely fulfilling his destiny, the young man feels no guilt in planning and preparing for murder, or indeed remorse afterwards. When he later learns that the palm-reader was a charlatan, he still has no regrets. Themes: the shallowness and hypocrisy of the Victorian upper class, destiny, murder, morals, karma.
